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7 October 2016 marks the fifteenth anniversary of the invasion of Afghanistan. Many Western leaders claimed the invasion, dubbed Operation Enduring Freedom, was a humanitarian intervention to liberate Afghans and especially Afghan women and girls from the brutal Taliban regime. However, the evidence demonstrates the results have been anything but humane or liberating.

The people truly liberated by the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan are the wealthy investors in the military-industrial complex and those betting on successfully extracting Afghan resources and developing the infrastructure of the New Silk Road. ... read full story / add a comment

Turkey's incursion into northern Syria on 24 August was flagged up as a move to drive the so-called Islamic State (ISIS) out of the border town of Jarabulus. But that is just a cover: Turkey's not very secret major objective is to crush the 50,000-strong Kurdish YPG (People's Protection Unit) militia, and overrun the three autonomous Kurdish dominated areas, collectively called “Rojava” by the Kurds. ... read full story / add a comment

The immense catastrophe that struck Turkey in the streets of Ankara, the capital city, on 10 October, when two bombs exploded in the midst of a thronging crowd of what would possibly turn out to be hundreds of thousands of people, leading to the death of an indefinite number of people, in any case exceeding one hundred, and the wounding of hundreds, some still under the risk of death, is a sharp reminder, if any were needed, that this is a country undergoing a severe political crisis. The tragic loss of life, ranging from a nine-year old boy to a seventy-year old woman and involving the deaths of a very high number of young people, has left the working-class movement, the broad left, the community of Alevis, the minority religious denomination in Turkey, and the Kurdish people, all of whom were involved in the peace demonstration that was attacked, in profound grief and mourning. It is cause for consolation, however, to witness the fact that the main aim of this hideous attack has been thwarted since, despite the grief, the masses have not been intimidated and have come out in militant mood both to protest and to bury their dead.

In unusually precipitated fashion, the government has claimed to have carried out an investigation on what it purports to be a double suicide bombing. They point their fingers at the ill-famed ISIL (the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, also known as ISIS) and claim that this was an attack on the unity of Turkey (why those who target the unity of the country have for decades now attacked the demonstrations of the working-class or of the oppressed minorities and never a right-wing rally remains a mystery!) ... read full story / add a comment

The United States trumpets education as one of its shining successes of the war in Afghanistan. But a BuzzFeed News investigation reveals U.S. claims were often outright lies, as the government peddled numbers it knew to be false and touted schools that have never seen a single student. ... read full story / add a comment

e Kurdish town of Cizre, a settlement with a population of approximately 150 thousand souls in Southeastern Turkey, is now under siege by the Turkish armed forces and the so-called “special operation force” of the police for a second time, after a previous one-week long siege was lifted for an interlude of two days. Around-the-clock curfew is accompanied by power cuts and the interruption of all means of communication including mobile telephones and the Internet. The evidence that came out when the first round of siege was lifted attests to a terrible human drama. Over 30 civilians are dead, ranging from a 35-day old infant to a 75-year old man. Before the siege was lifted, government sources claimed that security forces had killed more than a dozen fighters of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), the Kurdish guerrilla army, denying any civilian deaths. How the baby and the old man could have contributed to the fight of the PKK remains a mystery unexplored by government spokespeople after the facts have come to light. [Italiano] ... read full story / add a comment

By suggesting that the state of Israel should not exist, I am not being anti-Semitic. I am, however, being anti-Zionist. There is a distinct difference. An anti-Semite is someone who is prejudiced against Jews. An anti-Zionist, on the other hand, is opposed to that sector of the Jewish population who see it as their God-given right to establish a Jewish state in the Holy Land at the expense of the Palestinian people who have lived there for two thousand years. ... read full story / add a comment

Three decades ago, with the end of the Cold War and the dismantling of the South American dictatorships, many hoped that the much talked about ‘peace dividend’ promised by Bush senior and Thatcher would actually materialise. No such luck. Instead, we have experienced continuous wars, upheavals, intolerance and fundamentalisms of every sort – religious, ethnic and imperial. The exposure of the Western world’s surveillance networks has heightened the feeling that democratic institutions aren’t functioning as they should, that, like it or not, we are living in the twilight period of democracy itself. ... read full story / add a comment

A press report in 1983 that a popular uprising in Upper Volta, a small and poor land-locked country in Western Africa had led to an obscure, but charismatic army officer becoming head of state was truly inspiring news for all those looking for some kind of breakthrough against imperialism in that part of the world. It had come after the depressing news that Margaret Thatcher's Britain had defeated Argentina in the Malvinas and Ronald Reagan's America had crushed Grenada, a clear message to the world that, on a moment's notice, imperialism would brutally crush anything that threatened its power. But because the American empire had been taken by surprise by the Cuban revolution twenty-four years earlier, many of us were then hopeful that maybe we were witnessing such a possibility again, in Africa. ... read full story / add a comment

To be fair, he wasn’t wholly responsible. If it wasn’t for all the lunacy that preceded him, I probably would have dismissed his cartoon as just another Herald Sun atrocity, more a piece of Murdoch-madness to be mocked rather than trigger for outrage. But context is everything. And after days of sanctimonious blather about freedom of speech and the Enlightenment values of Western civilisation, his was one pencil-warfare cartoon too many. ... read full story / add a comment

The text “In Rojava: People’s War is not Class War”, which you can read below, represents a contribution of the “Internationalist Communist Tendency” (ICT) to a debate that has been taking place in certain circles claiming “anti-capitalist struggle” since several weeks. The central points of this discussion are current events in Western Kurdistan - Rojava. ... read full story / add a comment

Turkish troops and so-called 'moderate Islamist' Free Syrian Army (FSA) militants have entered Jarablus town centre and taken over all government buildings from Islamic State. Reports say almost no clashes took place between the two sides as IS militants had evacuated the city days before. Footage from FSA militants also shows that there is no civilian presence left in the city in Syria's north.